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Topic: How Many Types of Missiles Do you Need? (Read 2647 times)

Seeing as every new type of missile requires you to manually distribute them across your empire and needs a missile launcher of appropriate size to launch them, it seems that it would be best to decide on keeping missiles at a similar size depending on their roles so you don't need to swap out launchers for every iteration.

For instance, is it really necessary to have 3 different sizes of anti-ship missile? If you make a bigger ship, isn't it better to simply add more existing launchers to fire more existing missiles simultaneously than to have to design a larger launcher to fire larger missiles?

I say you only need two types of missiles; anti-missile and anti-ship and that those missiles should be kept at the same size for the whole play-through with the only upgrades being new tech.

The considerations that make me choose a particular size don't tend to change much with tech.

Size 1 for AMMs and saturation attacks.Size 7 for something just large enough for a sensor or a 2-stage approach, a small footpring and 1HTK in a box launcher.I may have one larger size which be pretty much anything, size 25 seems a good compromise - large enough for most complicated things I may want to try, not excessive for single-stage use.

While I may design multiple versions (different sensors, different ranges for fighters and warships etc, different splits of warhead and agility), standardising on size seems good.Also, I don't generally upgrade things very much... old ammo will be expended liberally, obsolescent ships will be used on the fringes in peacetime and be used for risky missions in war.

Personally I use 2-3 sizes for 3 types of missiles. Anti-Missile, Anti-Smallcraft and Anti-Ship.

The only reason I go to 3 is that I find my Anti-ship missiles have trouble chasing fighters/FACs, while my Anti-missile missiles don't have enough damage or range to clean them up easily.

I'm also debating whether I will include a larger missile type in more developed empires for dealing with larger combat ships but I have not yet encountered large enough ships often enough where this would be advantageous.

How do you all get away with such large missiles? I mostly use size 2 or 3, anything larger and pd weapons (especially railguns) become so space effective that it becomes easy to get all incoming missiles shot down by final fire pd, making larger missiles completely useless unless I use box launchers only.

How do you all get away with such large missiles? I mostly use size 2 or 3, anything larger and pd weapons (especially railguns) become so space effective that it becomes easy to get all incoming missiles shot down by final fire pd, making larger missiles completely useless unless I use box launchers only.

Or do you play against the ai, which is notoriously bad at pd?

Launcher size scales with ship size. So the bigger the ship, the bigger the missile. In the same number of launchers. So salvo size is not decreased at all.

How do you all get away with such large missiles? I mostly use size 2 or 3, anything larger and pd weapons (especially railguns) become so space effective that it becomes easy to get all incoming missiles shot down by final fire pd, making larger missiles completely useless unless I use box launchers only.

Or do you play against the ai, which is notoriously bad at pd?

Mostly playing against the AI, but I tend to design with PD in mind.If using large missiles, I often try to overwhelm fire controls rather than weapons, sometimes with 1 fire control per tube.Point blank fire in a pinch (if the missile hits in the same increment it is fire, only CIWS will respond. I'm sad to see this feature go; the above is effective enough and this was a cool flavourful desperation move for ships not built for brawls).

How do you all get away with such large missiles? I mostly use size 2 or 3, anything larger and pd weapons (especially railguns) become so space effective that it becomes easy to get all incoming missiles shot down by final fire pd, making larger missiles completely useless unless I use box launchers only.

Or do you play against the ai, which is notoriously bad at pd?

I generally use a mix of heavily armoured missiles along with lightly armoured missiles to burn through AMM and point blank. of course this could be countered by using mesons, but by the if you are using mesons, that means I can bully the enemy my own AMM, wich I usually make quite long ranged, meaning I can usually just bully any fleet out of a sistem. by the way my anti-ship missiles are size 12 i know I am crazy